Garvan Institute research provides new hope for women living with breast cancer

TONY EASTLEY: Research from the Garvan Institute in Sydney could provide new hope for millions of women living with breast cancer.

Seventy per cent of patients have a form of cancer that feeds off the hormone oestrogen. It initially responds well to treatment, but often relapses and then is deadly.

Scientists are now doing genetic testing on cancer cells to find alternative ways of helping people beat cancer for good.

Here's Eliza Harvey.

ELIZA HARVEY: The majority of women with breast cancer have something called oestrogen receptor positive cancer. The cancer cells are reliant on oestrogen for growth and survival, so by stopping the hormone, you stop the growth of the cancer.

Dr Andrew Stone from the Garvan Institute says the most common treatment is a drug called Tamoxifen, which patients take for five years.

ANDREW STONE: Generally that's really, really well tolerated and really well received by the patients but unfortunately in approximately 50 per cent of patients, they'll experience disease relapse and actually develop a more aggressive form of the tumour within 15 years of being diagnosed in the first instance.

Unfortunately at this time, there's no real confirmed therapeutic strategy that's really going to help these patients.

ELIZA HARVEY: With no more treatment options left, patients usually die.

Now, researchers at the Garvan Institute are conducting genetic tests on cells already resistant to drugs like Tamoxifen.

Dr Stone's research has found that if a gene is 'switched off', it's more vulnerable to chemotherapy. So if patients are found to have that genetic structure, they could be treated with Tamoxifen in combination with chemo.

Dr Catriona McNeil is an oncologist affiliated with the Garvan Institute.

CATRIONA MCNEIL: Firstly, it validates what our common clinical practice is, which is that when we have a patient who is on a hormone tablet and it appears to stop working, our strategy usually is to change to chemotherapy.

ELIZA HARVEY: Dr McNeil says the research is in its early days, but if proven through clinical trials, could transform the way breast cancer patients are treated.

CATRIONA MCNEIL: Trying to sort out which of those patients should have had chemotherapy, or indeed the patients who really only ever needed a hormone treatment and didn't need chemotherapy at all, is one of the holy grails, if you like, of breast cancer treatment - trying to really tailor down who needs what treatment.

And at the moment, the current ways that we determine who gets what are fairly blunt, and it's based on pretty crude indicators such as how big the tumour is and some of these molecular features.

So the studies that Dr Stone and his group have done are helping us, I suppose, to determine some sort of molecular precision as to whom in the future may be able to be spared chemotherapy and also to determine who really does need chemotherapy.

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